Information technology (IT) service procedures are typically captured as enterprise processes. Each enterprise process can have several tasks and sub-processes. Documents, charts, tools and/or role players can be associated with the tasks. IT services as enterprise processes are not necessarily optimized to accommodate the constantly changing enterprise needs of new types of customers and their requirements. Emergence of new enterprise demands and fast changing technology impose time and resource challenges to meet the market demands. The enterprise processes advantageous should be competitive and optimized to provide a return on investment (ROI) within a very short span of time with minimal resource utilization.
Existing approaches include various inefficiencies. For example, existing enterprise processes (termed as best practices) are certainly not “the best” representation of the processes, with inadequate information available for a wide variety of processes. Also, several similar processes are termed as different processes due to targeted customer needs, thus leading to each process representing a customized process assembly line.
Existing approaches can also include static processes (with a combination of series of tasks) that make process enrichment, leading to process optimization and standardization of a process, quite complex and labor intensive. Static organization of processes with inadequate knowledge representation leads to difficulties in locating and duplicating tasks with different names and/or with a wide variety of inputs, outputs and association with other tasks.
Existing approaches do not include a standard naming convention or mechanism that would lead to discovery of the nature of a process or task without knowing the details of the process or task. Productivity in an enterprise environment, including accelerated ramping into operations through effective training, are process-dependent. A process name should advantageously be self-explanatory towards its usability within the context of a process chain.